(Leap Year!) Unlike the 1%, most of us have to make a living. It’s almost time for me to have to spend way too many hours cranking out t shirt designs for the summer festival season. Realistically, it’s a relatively innocuous way to make a living, but that doesn’t keep me from griping about having to put down the paintbrush and pick up my graphic artist costume. I wish something I love to do actually made money – all my other interests are also noteworthy for being not very lucrative: gardening, farming, being an amateur naturalist. Do investment bankers love thinking about money? Perhaps everyone dislikes what they have to do for money. Maybe if someone was standing at the studio door, tapping their foot and waiting for me to finish a painting so they could pay me for it, I wouldn’t want to do that either? I AM awfully contrary.

This week’s piece is several months old; I did this on deadline for a RACC auction (that’s Rockbridge Area Conservation Council). I did enjoy painting this, so maybe that disproves my worry of the previous paragraph. Actually, I had in mind donating another painting entirely, but that was not going well at all, and after spending weeks trying to make it work, in frustration I turned to this one, to take out my frustrations on it. After just a few hours, I knew it was better than the one I’d been working on for so long. So Be It.